Is Scarlet Street (1945) public domain?

The evidence we relied on to restore, describe and publish it — in full, so you can check it.

Rights basis on record

The finding, and the working behind it

Original registration LP30, (c) Universal Pictures Co., Inc., 28 Dec 1945 (1946 CCE volume). Renewal fell due December 1972 to December 1973, before the online catalog, so the printed Catalog of Copyright Entries volumes for 1972, 1973 and 1974 were read (front-end seat, 19 Sep 2026). The only 'scarlet' hits are The Scarlet Clue and The Scarlet Horseman. Universal renewed the neighbors L28 and L29 (8 Jun 1973, R553201 and R553202), L25 and L31-L35; L30 is absent. Not searched: the underlying novel La Chienne and its play, music, or anything outside the United States. Copy: the Archive's ScarletStreet, MPEG-2 640x384.

How to check this yourself

Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:

The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.

The copy, and what we changed

The print we started from: The source print for Scarlet Street on archive.org
Researched: 2026-10-01
What we did to the print: 327 described cues across a 101 minute 32 second runtime, filling 24 minutes of gaps between dialogue -- 23.7 percent of the film -- at 162 words per minute.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 4 kHz, loudness matched in two passes.; Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.; Captioned verbatim: 1,124 cues, every disputed line ruled by Mike.

What this does and does not mean

This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.

A negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.

Restoring a public domain film gives nobody any new rights over the film, including us: this print is free to take, use and pass on, exactly as the original is.

The audio description is not part of that. It is an original work written and recorded by Always on Top Entertainment LLC — free to listen to here, and licensed separately for reuse. If you hold a right in this film and we have it wrong, write to [email protected] and we will take it down while we check.

Watch it

Scarlet Street (1945) is free to watch here, restored and audio described, with no account and no advertising.

Why we did this research

Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.